Twelve Hours From Departure

It is 4:30am and I will be leaving in just over twelve hours. It hasn't sunk in yet, I haven't let it. I tell myself I have been distracted by the seemingly endless loose ends that need to be tended to before I leave for two months, that the end of an academic term is always hectic without an impending trip of this nature anyway. Truth be told, I am afraid that I will be afraid. The last time I worked in a refugee camp, I lived there for two years. Two years to learn, make mistakes, mend them, and struggle to create small meaningful gestures and relationships that would justify my presence there. Now, two months not two years.
I will be fine, but the weight of things is slowly slipping down over my shoulders. It is a sober thing to face a dream that is built on the welfare of others. I am not a doctor, I am not saving lives, but my oath is no less sacred. I want to take all the good things a career in education has afforded me and tangle it all up in the good faith and trust I will find in that camp in the northeast corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I want to laugh, teach, write, and to stare up into the heavens each night knowing I have stripped myself of my ego and selfish needs to do some simple things purely. It is no longer atonement for a lifetime of regrets or mistakes - it is the communion of education, honest and bare. I don't think I am afraid, but maybe I should be :)